With respect to the question of a neutral meridian, Professor ADAMS wished to call the attention of the Congress to the fact that the Delegates here present are not a collection of representatives of belligerents; that they are all neutral as men should be in a matter purely scientific, or in any other matter which affects the convenience of the world at large, and that this Conference is not met here at the end of a war to see how territory should be divided, but in a friendly way, representing friendly nations. He stated that he hoped the Delegates would be guided in their decision by the main consideration, which was, What will tend to the greatest practical convenience of the world? That he need not address a word to the other part of the argument which he thought at first of commenting upon a little, for the Delegate of the United States, Commander SAMPSON, who spoke first, had put his views so clearly before the Conference that he (Professor ADAMS) would not detain it longer. He would add, however, that if the Conference is to take a neutral meridian they must either erect an observatory on the point selected, which might be very inconvenient if they should choose such a point as is alluded to by the Delegate of France, or if some such place was not selected, we should merely have a zero of longitude by a legal fiction, and that would not be a real zero at all; that they would have to select their zero with reference to a known observatory, and that, for instance, supposing they took a point for zero twenty degrees west of Paris, of course that would be really adopting Paris as the prime meridian; that it would not be so nominally, but in reality it would be, and he thought that we now-a-days should get rid of legal fictions as much as possible, and call things by their right names. Mr. JANSSEN, Delegate of France, said: